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I am made of fail at commenting the last couple weeks – even at responding to comments on my own blog! I’ll get around to it at some point this week hopefully.

This isn’t helped by the fact that with the addition of SAN into my feed reader…well…let’s just say I’m keeping up, but barely. But there’s something deeply satisfying in knowing almost every time I refresh Google reader there’ll be something new, insightful, thought-provoking, amusing, and unfailingly entertaining.

On the upside, I discovered the “Star this post” option in Google reader a while back and have happily been starring away at posts I truly intend to comment on, but never get around to it. In lieu of said comments (which may yet materialize! I haven’t given up completely!), here’s a sampling of the posts I’ve starred (note: some of these may be older, but they’re still wonderful posts and definitely worth a read):

Don’t-Quit-Your-Day-Job Holy Paladin PvP – PvP, like RP, remains an aspect of the game I am completely unfamiliar with, but occasionally fascinated by. A very common sense set of tips from a PvE healadin on the basic brain-shifts required for PvP.

Sing, Azerothian Muse and A Whole New World – both starred for the intriguing insights into the differences between the Alliance and the Horde and what it means/feels like to be a member of either.

Tamadin – a painfully amusing look at the pally as a tank, from the perspective of the healer playing it.

Battling the Burnout – another look at burnout in WoW. In particular I find the idea of a burnout cycle, and the potential of being stuck in one forever, interesting.

Don’t go wasting your emotion – another Righteous Orbs post that hits dangerously close to home. Did a bit of a double-take and took a closer look at my own reactions to things after reading it.

Can someone offer the LK a lozenge? – because I’ve had this same issue on more than one boss, and though I doubt I’ll ever see the LK I am disappointed in advance. He’s the final bad guy, not just of this expansion but of the game to date! Crank it up a bit, Blizz!

Note : This post was written without the aid of a Francophone, over the course of a good thirty minutes, and is therefore subject to extreme linguistic errors. No dictionaries were harmed in the writing of this post; however, my Bescherelle almost went into the shredder before I realized I was actually speaking in present-tense for once and didn’t need it.

In case I mangled the translation worse than I think I did, suffice it to say that I’m extremely grateful to everyone who’s read my Frenchcraft posts and enjoyed them, to those who’ve taken the time to comment, and to those who’ve actually been willing to speak to me in French (whether it’s just a “bonjour” when I log on, or a more detailed conversation in whispers or the SANfr channel) – to say nothing of those who kindly put up with my French item-links in the guild chat. ^^

/hug to all of you. This would be so much harder and astoundingly less fun without you.

Also note: I do have an actual real Word of Frenchcraft post in the works, just haven’t had time to pull my thoughts together on it. Soon…ish…

Did you know there are mods for RPing? I must have known this, once upon a time, but had either completely forgotten or honestly never realized it. I consider myself educated on the subject now, and can confirm that yes, there are indeed mods for RPing.

How many, I don’t know. I only played with two of them (recommended by the lovely folks at Single Abstract Noun (EU). The first, Gryphonheart Items, let’s you make fake items you can link in chat windows. It was fun right up until it started spamming me with enough LUA errors to prompt the game to politely inquire as to whether I would like to disable it. I pouted a bit, but clicked yes and have not yet had a chance to play with it again.

The other was FlagRSP (I believe that was the name…going from memory here). It’s actually a very simple mod – you click a button and enter in any prefixes to your character’s name (Ms., Lady, Sister, etc.), your last name, any titles you may have (King of Urmum, Lord of the Dance, Starbucks Barista, etc.), and a “physical description”. From that point forward, as you run around the inexplicably populated Silvermoon, you will be assaulted by windows providing you all of the above information for anyone you mouse over who also has the mod installed.

It is, if nothing else, entertaining to read some of them.

So my patient guildies gave me a crash course in the dos and don’ts of FlagRSP descriptions (DO: have a scar, or state very strongly that you do not. DON’T: hesitate to include a six page dissertation on your character’s history and background. Half-vampire, half-dragon, lesbian daughters of Thrall are strongly encouraged), and I must have spent a good thirty minutes just staring at the interface and filling in the fields:

Prefix: N/A
Last Name: du Soleil (with apologies to those who wanted me to go with Poire. My tongue has trouble saying Poivre Poire – plus, most BEs tend to have sun-based last names and I’m assuming RPers are picky about their canon)
Title(s): Artiste
Physical Description: Poivre appears to be the cheerful, dependable sort, though she wears her sword and shield uncomfortably, as though the weight is unfamiliar to her.

Boom. That’s it. 30 minutes for that – not even counting translation time on the physical description so I can continue to justify using my “Time To Learn French Account” on an English server (though I’m doing more actual conversing in French, ironically, on the English server than the French one (with un grand merci to Mihiel for the help and patience)).

Understand that I’ve sort of been fascinated by the RP side of WoW for some time. I have a character or two sitting somewhere around level 7 on a couple different RP servers, but was never able to commit to them, and they never saw any RP action.

The extent of my RPing to date has been a single run-in with somebody obviously taking it very srsly:

Poivre was stopped by a very polite Tauren just sort of meandering along the road in Eversong. He inquired as to where he might find Lor’Thremar, and Poivre replied “follow the road south until you reach the city of Silvermoon. Ask any guard where the priests and the mages reside – he can usually be found in their company.”

With copious backspacing of pesky things like acronyms and emoticons and other various grammatical idiosyncrasies that I assumed were inappropriate under the circumstances. The first cut of my response was: “Back of SM near the port to UC. :)”

“Thank you, young elf,” replied the Tauren, gravely I believe, and wandered once more on his slow, ponderous way.

And all of this took place in the Say, which just boggles the mind really. The Say is a place for newbies and for conspirators out of range of the rest of their party. It’s not the place for civilized talking – except, apparently, on an RP server, where it’s the only place for civilized talking. I would imagine the Yell and the Whisper channels are only used to actually yell or whisper.

Crazy RPers! Next thing you know they’re going to try to tell me that Trade is for actual trading!

But then where would we LFG and tell [Anal] jokes, hmmm?

Anyway, I had a point, I’m sure I did. Daylight Savings Time has robbed me of two hours of sleep (if you count me going to bed at the old usual time, which is now an hour later than it used to be, and getting up at the new get-up time, which is an hour earlier), along with a good deal of what little sense I had.

Oh yes! FlagRSP and my curiosity about actually, you know, getting in on some of the RP fun.

So I filled out my entry as described above, and came to the bottom of the form where there are two little sliders – one to indicate whether you’re in character, out of character, or “looking for contact” (which frightens me more than a little bit, given some of the stories I’ve been hearing from people wandering through Goldshire on the US side). The other to say whether you’re not interested in RPing, a beginner RPer, a casual RPer, or a veteran RPer. The options may be worded slightly differently than that, but you get the idea.

Each of these sliders also has an option to hide your status.

Up until this point, I had been having a good deal of fun. I like creating unnecessarily detailed back stories for my characters regardless of what kind of server they’re on. Finding a last name for Poivre (cheap though it wound up being in the end!) and deciding enough about her personality and background to be able to fill the fields with something at least minorly useful was an enjoyable diversion. She may not be a half-vampire, half-dragon lesbian daughter of Thrall, but I like her anyway. And I swear to God I was all set to actually, you know, try the RP thing out.

But then I stared at those sliders. There were a lot more options than I’d thought there were. And unless I picked the “Do Not Want” options (in which case, why did I even fill out the fields?), it would be the equivalent of flagging myself for PvP – sooner or later, someone else would see me and try to strike up a conversation. Maybe I’d be doing something innocuous, like checking my mail, or AH surfing. Maybe I’d be fighting a zombie. I don’t know. But they’d saunter on up to me and ask me what I think of the latest political maneuverings in Silvermoon’s royal court. Or where they could find Deathholme because they are on an Urgent Quest To Save The World And Would I Like To Join Them But We Have To Walk Very Slowly All The Way There. Or why am I wearing a sword and shield I’m so obviously uncomfortable with?

It dawned on my slowly that for no apparent reason I was terrified.

I stared with no small amount of trepidation and pushed the sliders up one notch…